


Fatalities

by Bryn Lantry (Bryn)



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M, poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1993-01-01
Updated: 1993-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-03 17:00:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bryn/pseuds/Bryn%20Lantry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am a lunatic. This is my love poem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fatalities

###

You and I, Roj Blake, dared death and each other  
with a crackpot audacity until,  
left in desolate mastery of the ship,  
I knew our years might be endured apart  
but our extermination must be linked.  
An ironic, if merely symbolic, defeat of fate,  
like that sung in ballads where briars  
from the graves of the thwarted  
crawl to weave with each other and flower.  
I told bitch Servalan  
when she won our dead ship, my theory:  
that in my last hour you would plug  
the hole of space  
which from too much porthole-gazing  
had passed into my flesh  
and proliferated there –  
cold anti-matter  
to the matter of your love.  
#

Here, as predicted, is our defiant flowering,  
engineered by me  
in the klaxons and red gloom of this cellar.  
Not a cellar? But my destiny demands the metaphor.  
Division returns as you fall,  
but your hands drag on me heavy as anchors,  
your single eye a murky laser,  
swearing me the next casualty.  
I need simply wait over those leaking guts, the evidence  
of my crime and yours,  
theory proven. Nowhere in Orac's infinity  
could you escape  
our terminal togetherness.  
You won't notice the pun, my other love.  
#

I suspected death, or if not, dementia –  
prospects we used to speak of as equivalent –  
and you were necessary to my prophecy.  
I found you camouflaged in caricature,  
a blackguard swarthy with grime,  
one eye fey, one eye already dead,  
a rusty scar and a smirch of beard.  
#

You stare from eyes the shade, I often thought,  
of a stiff scotch, which I farewelled  
in a swarm of Andromedans and photon torpedoes.  
“We didn't make love enough,” you stated then,  
catching me short, and wheezed in your bandage.  
You'd never previously given the occurrences a name.  
“Three times,” I informed you.  
“Only three?”  
“Once after Control. Once after Atlay. Once,  
if you stretch the definition,  
during your Docholli hunt.”  
Three, too, was the number  
of my plunges  
the once you grabbed my hips and sank me  
into the deep cavern between your thighs.  
Of this statistic I didn't remind you.  
You smiled, crookedly. “You've kept a tally, Avon.”  
(My first traitor teased,  
“Why don't I ever know what you're thinking?”  
Because I couldn't ever say,  
fortunately). I just answered you, “Why not?”  
#

I journeyed to this planet down a fetid  
and narrowing tunnel  
where the brain-food of oxygen thinned  
into a miasma that was nutrient  
only to delirium.  
Who whipped me down the tunnel?  
You, who thrust your monstrous love into me  
and carelessly left it behind  
interred in me and cankering.  
Who was the tunnel's escape hatch, that far-off  
light like a pearl?  
Truant you, you must again possess me  
as massive and hot as the devil possesses.  
#

As a matter of interest, I wondered  
whether the prophecy might operate thus.  
Did you think the parallels  
between an intelligence agent and a bounty hunter  
would escape my superstitious streak?  
I told the crew your sell-out  
was irrelevant –  
presaging that I came merely to drop  
into our 'hole in the ground', yours and mine.  
Bitterness, hatred, never did stop us  
from the necessary things -  
our desire, which wrung out of us in sweat  
the excess madness,  
our companioned death.  
Relevant to you, possibly,  
since I was particular about discharging  
three bullets.  
I kept a tally, my love, remember?

###


End file.
